It’s considered one of the fundamental tools businesses require to help manage their database contacts, leads, opportunities and marketing campaigns, and in some cases even projects and support. The purpose of CRM is to bring together all sources of company information to try and provide your staff with a holistic view of any one customer, and provide your customers with the most seamless experience possible.

But how does it actually work and how can it benefit your business?

Informed Decisions

By having all information about a customer in one accessible place enables your staff to make quick, informed decisions. The benefits of a unified CRM system means we can learn about their habits and behaviours through marketing, understand the customers value, and more effectively sell to them in the future.

We all know how annoying it is when we speak to our electricity provider and they have to check multiple systems in order to get the information they need about you, which is waste of yours and their time. This is compounded when we get passed between customer service departments who don’t have a streamlined CRM system and end up having to repeat all of our details to them.

Cost Savings

The costs of maintaining multiple applications, systems and associated hardware can soon mount up so one system helps to bring this down. Not only do you physically save money, but because your staff only have to go to one place for customer information you will also save man hours of otherwise wasted time researching customer information.

The next generation of CRM now also integrates social media channels so that we can learn more about our customers outside of a working environment. Understanding what makes a customer tick in their personal life will help to enhance your relationship with them. This could be as simple as knowing one of your customers all share a pizza at lunchtimes on Monday, simply by monitoring their Twitter feed. Maybe you could impress and surprise them by ordering their next round of pizzas, you can be sure they would probably turn to you come their next opportunity or requirement for your services.

CRM has become the hub of many organisations who believe that by focussing on their customer’s wants and needs, and centralising this information, will enable them to develop smarter products or services, provide better support and improve customer loyalty and returns.

Tricostar specialise in Shared Services, IT Helpdesk Software, and Microsoft Sharepoint.